iNaturalist US & Canada species observation velocity (weekly)

Weekly leaderboard of the most-observed species on iNaturalist (keyless official API v1, verifiable observations only) for the trailing 7 complete UTC days, separately for the United States (place_id=1) and Canada (place_id=6712) — one row per country x species x week, up to 500 species per country. Taxon entity resolution on the stable iNaturalist taxon id (non-species ranks, inactive and extinct taxa dropped loudly); iconic-taxa closed-set classification; a documented 0-100 velocity_score = 100*(0.6*min-max log10 weekly observations + 0.4*min-max log10 weekly share of lifetime observations), computed within each country and ranked as velocity_rank (ties: weekly count desc, taxon_id asc), with high/medium/low velocity_tier and a plain country_rank by weekly count; emergence_flag marks species with >= 0.5% of lifetime observations in the single week on a >= 100-observation base. Day-granular as-of stamping makes same-day re-runs frame-identical; late-uploaded observations drift historical weeks slightly. Per-row taxon page and country-specific API query URLs. Primary key: (week_start, country_code, taxon_id). Caveats: counts reflect observer effort/geography, not abundance (charismatic, urban bias; US list dominates by volume); lifetime counts are a point-in-time denominator. Only aggregate counts stored (factual statistics) -> commercial_use=yes with iNaturalist attribution. Sample use: order by velocity_rank within a country for the week's most-watched species, or filter emergence_flag = 1 for unusual activity spikes.